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Women's Soccer Team To Be Named 'Portland Thorns'

The crowd for Wednesday night's Portland Thorns FC vs. Seattle Reign FC is expected to be the second-largest in professional women's soccer history.

Courtesy of the Portland Thorns FC.

Portland’s newest professional sports franchise – the women’s soccer team – has a name: the Portland Thorns Football Club. The team’s logo features a rose surrounded by green thorns on a black background.

Merritt Paulson, who owns the Thorns and the Portland Timbers, is a fan of the new name and logo. But he says his first choice would’ve been to use the name “Timbers” again, for the women’s team. What he calls “commercial obligations” made that impossible.

“Basically one league’s an ‘Adi’ league, or an Adidas league, the other’s the Nike league, that was kind of off the table,” Paulson said. “So we certainly wanted to come up with a name that resonated with the community, our market, and had a link to the Timbers’ team as well.”

Paulson likes the fact that the Thorns and Timbers have the same abbreviation: P-T-F-C. Those letters form one of the most popular chants of the fan group, the Timbers Army.